29 March, 2017

A brief description of the mutation of the neoliberal cancer into the neofeudalism

The main
substantive achievement of neoliberalism has been to redistribute,
rather than to generate, wealth and income.

'Accumulation
by dispossession', meaning the commodification and privatization of
land and the forceful expulsion of peasant populations, conversion of
various forms of property rights into exclusive private property
rights; suppression of rights to the commons; colonial, neocolonial,
and imperial processes of appropriation of assets including natural
resources; and usury, the national debt and, most devastating of all,
the use of the credit system as a radical means of accumulation by
dispossession.

To this list
of mechanisms we may now add a raft of techniques such as the
extraction of rents from patents and intellectual property rights and
the diminution of or erasure of various forms of communal property
rights (such as state pensions, paid vacations, access to education
and healthcare) won through a generation or more of class struggle.

The proposal
to privatize all state pension rights (pioneered in Chile under the
dictatorship) is, for example, one of the cherished objectives of the
Republicans in the US.

The
concept of Accumulation
by dispossession, presented
by the Marxist geographer David Harvey, defines the neoliberal
capitalist policies in many western nations, from the 1970s and to
the present day, as resulting in a centralization of wealth and power
in the hands of a few by dispossessing the public of their wealth or
land. These neoliberal policies are guided mainly by four practices:
privatization, financialization, management and manipulation of
crises, and state redistributions.